Maus banned, The Beat Covers SDCC, My Hero Academia ending, and more— Comics Bookmark 6/30/2024
Maus ban. Who created Wolverine? The best selling comic of 2025 already announced. New Mignola!!!!! All that and more in this week’s links.
I've really been digging Chris Condon and Jacob Phillip's That Texas Blood (briefly talked about here) and while The Enfield Gang Massacre serves as a prequel to their series, you can read it by itself easily. It's a great western tale about how our stories change over time and I wrote a bit about it this week.
Headlines
Armando Tinoco
I'm so sorry to hear about this. While most of the headlines highlight Becker's time on MTV's The Real World, she was also involved in the early day of Wildstorm back in La Jolla, CA.
I think it's also important to say that if you're having any suicidal thoughts, try to seek help right away. There's a lot of different ways you can do that, starting with calling 998.
Zach Rabiroff
There’s a lot here in this fairly comprehensive read by Zach Rabiroff. One thing we probably won’t get for years, if not decades, is what drove Marvel /Disney to make this change to how it documents the ownership of Wolverine. Right or wrong, I can see what drove Thomas to pursue this but what was the argument that won the corporation over to now giving Thomas co-creator credit on Wolverine? And what kind of doors does this open for other editors to pursue having their names added as co-creators to other characters?
And I haven’t seen it anywhere before (and if this has been called out elsewhere, I apologize in advance,) but the way that Rabiroff makes this part of the continuing issue about creator credit, tying what’s happening here back to the controversies of the creation of Superman and Batman, shows just how this has been a part of the fabric of the business of comics.
Alex Young
This is a bit related to comics because somewhere in MTV News' run, they started covering comics pretty good, looking to take on the likes of Newsarama and CBR at the time. It feel like it only lasted maybe a year or two before they shut it down but I remember their coverage being pretty good and expansive. Was the comic coverage taken down years ago? I don't remember it even still being accessible.
But this also speaks to how large chunks of articles and information is lost when sites like this just wipe out their content (and that's all it is to them) rather than trying to figure out some way to archive it.
People Editorial Guidelines:max_bytes(150000):strip_icc():focal(749x0:751x2)/Raina-Telgemeier-Scott-McCloud-062424-8a3a02cfe4c54401b27ee78d6b799830.jpg)
Well, I think we have a front runner for best selling book of 2025. I'll be curious to see how this collaboration works. Both are great storytellers (even if I don't always like McCloud's stories– any The New Adventures of Abraham Lincoln stans out there– but his Zot! and Understanding Comics are still pivotal comics even if we don't talk about them as much.) And it's great to see that Telgemeier continuing to be a creative artist and mentor for these younger generations.
Andrew Lapin
Maus? Filthy and evil? Maybe in what it depicts but not in the character of the book itself. More and more, you can tell that these people don’t read the books that they’re banning and, even worse, are trying to suppress the stories and histories contained in those books.
Comic Sites on Comic Sites
Borys Kit
This is an interesting team up. I can't wait to see how it works out for MacDonald and Comics Beat. A long time ago, when there was a SciFi channel, they had a couple of years where they really covered San Diego (and this was before nerd culture became pop culture) and for those of us not there, it was a great way to experience it.
Manga
Trent Cannon
Daniel Dockery
Both of these stories make me feel like I‘m out of touch with a whole, popular section of manga. I didn’t even realize that My Hero Academia was that old.
Business
Chris Arrant
I’ll believe it when I see it.
Humberto Saabedra
Talking about feeling out of touch with whole segments of comic fandom…
The Funny Pages
Richard McGuire's "Here" was originally published in 1989, and later expanded into a graphic novel in 2014.
— Rodrigo Baeza (@rodrigo__baeza) June 27, 2024
But there's a little-known, intermediate version that was published in Strapazin #59 (2000). Here's the complete 4-page story. pic.twitter.com/fUAMBmYX7m
I think I knew about this version of Richard McGuire’s Here (I wrote about the RAW version last year) but I’ve never seen it before. I know they’re making a movie out of it but that trailer for it looked awful. Go track down any of the comic versions of it and be prepared to loose yourself in this timeless story.
.@io9 has the first preview of Bowling with Corpses. https://t.co/typRmL2mAh pic.twitter.com/YqH4FMyy1H
— Mike Mignola (@artofmmignola) June 25, 2024
Interviews
Emilio Cirri
First off, I love the graphic image of this one, with Gillen the center seat of the Immortal X-Men #1.
This is also a good interview about Gillen's time back at Marvel, with a particular focus on his X-Men time but also diving a bit into his Eternals run. Is it weird that before the next X-era really beings, I'm already starting to feel a bit nostalgic for Krakoa? I think a large part of that is due to Gillen's involvement in bringing this most recent large story to an end.
Reviews & Features
Logan Dalton
I would love to see Logan do an issue-by-issue breakdown revisiting The Wicked + The Divine all these years later to see what his continuing thoughts on it are. When we were both writing (and he editing) on the now sadly defunct Sound on Sight site (now some weird zombie site under a different name,) I could see his love for the book. I really liked it but he connected to it on a whole different level than I did. Once at Panel Patter, I wrote "Some people are W+D people..." and I was thinking of Logan here.
Daniel Elkin
Always like it when Daniel is sharing his thoughts on books. I haven't read any Simon Moreton in a while and think I need to rectify that.
Susana Polo
This is a pretty good list from the fine people at Polygon. While I haven't read this Newburn story yet, I think they picked the right Zdarsky there.
And that Doom comic may be the most underrated book of the year, at least the most underrated Marvel book. Sanford Greene killed it on that book.
Rob liked this book a bit better than I did but I'm kind of intrigued by this whole GI Joe revival (I refuse to call it Energon or anything like that; I'm way more of A GI Joe guy than a Transformers guy) so I've been dipping into most of the series. This one left me a bit cold and I really didn't make any connection to it. The news this week that the team behind the Duke miniseries are taking on the main GI Joe comic actually has me a bit excited. Duke was a good action comic (not as good as Scarlett #1) so hopefully it gets to be its own story and not just an adjunct to the Transformers story.
